dejeuner, and had then proceeded for Paris, just
like any other well-behaved company of tourists.

There was nothing more to be done but go back to Nant and--what made it
even more disgusting--nothing to be done there except ... wait...

Thoroughly disgruntled, more than half persuaded he had staked a claim
for a mare's-nest, he took the road in the heat of a day even more
oppressive than its yesterday. In the valley of the Dourbie the air was
stagnant, lifeless. After eight miles of it Duchemin was guilty of two
mistakes of desperation.

In the first instance he paused in La Roque-Sainte-Marguerite and,
tormented by thirst, refreshed himself at the auberge where the
barouche and guide had been hired to convey the party from Montalais on
to Montpellier. The landlord remembered Duchemin and made believe he
didn't, serving the wayfarer with a surly grace the only drink he would
admit he had to sell, an atrociously acid cider fit to render the last
stage of thirst worse than the first.

Duchemin, however, thought it safer than the water of the place, when
he had spied out the associations of the well.

He drank sitting on a bench outside the door of the auberge. He could
hear the voice of the landlord inside, grumbling and growling, to what
purport he couldn't determine. But it wasn't difficult to guess; and
before Duchemin was finished he had testimony to the rightness of his
surmise, finding himself the cynosure of more than a few pair of eyes
set in the ill-favoured faces of natives of La Roque.

One gathered that the dead guide had enjoyed a fair amount of local
popularity.

While Duchemin drank and smoked and pored over a pocket-map of the
department, a lout of a lad shambled out of the auberge wearing a fixed
scowl in no degree mitigated by the sight of the customer. In the
dooryard, which was also the stableyard, the boy caught and saddled a
dreary animal, apparently a horse designed by a Gothic architect,
mounted, and rode off in the direction of Nant.

Then Duchemin committed his second error of judgment, which consisted
in thinking to find better and cooler air on the heights of the Causse
Larzac, across the river, together with a shorter way to
Nant--indicated on the pocket-map as a by-road running in a tolerably
direct line across the plateau--than that which followed the windings
of the stream.

Accordingly he crossed the Dourbie, toiled up a zig-zag path cut in the
face of the frowning cliff, reac